Paris in the Age of Absolutism

Orest Ranum

Paris in the Age of Absolutism

An Essay

Orest Ranum

“Cities do not grow beautiful by chance. None have. A fact forcibly brought home in [this] brilliant book. . . . Here we see how Paris grew, not only in people, in commerce, in riches, but also how it became a symbol, an expression of the aspiration of Louis XIV and his minister, Colbert, who wished to emulate Augustan Rome. *From the original edition” —J. H. Plumb, Saturday Review

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By the eighteenth century Paris was one of the great wonders of Europe, renowned for its magnificent royal monuments and as a center for science, literature, and the arts. More so than any other European city, Paris reflected the spirit of an age—an age that reached its zenith with the reign of France's Sun King, Louis XIV. No book better captures that spirit than Orest Ranum's Paris in the Age of Absolutism, first published in 1968 and now reissued in a revised and expanded edition.

Ranum's tour of Paris begins in the late 1500s with a French capital city exhausted by the violence of the Wars of Religion and proceeds through the long century that ends with the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Henry IV (1589-1610), head of the Bourbon branch of the royal family, laid the foundations of modern Paris, but it was during the mature years of his grandson, Louis XIV, and during the service of his visionary minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, that a New Rome was created. By 1715 the city was far different from what it had been in 1590. There were now large geometrical public squares with statues of the King at their focal point. There were arches of triumph, hospital-prisons, a new and gigantic wing on the Louvre, handsome stone bridges, streetlights, and massive stone quays along the Seine.

Ranum ranges widely through the streets and quarters of Paris, attentive to the achievements of town planners, architects, and engineers as well as to city politics, social currents, and the spirit of religious reform. Behind it all lay the rule-creating authoritarianism of the absolute state, which, ironically, unleashed Parisians' creative impulses in everything from literature, painting, and music to architecture, mathematics, and physics.

Paris in the Age of Absolutism is one of those rare books that combines elegant prose with stunning erudition, making it both captivating for general readers and challenging to scholars. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account the wealth of scholarship that has appeared since 1968. Of particular note are a new introduction and a new chapter on women writers. A larger format accentuates a full selection of illustrations, many of them new to this edition.

“Cities do not grow beautiful by chance. None have. A fact forcibly brought home in [this] brilliant book. . . . Here we see how Paris grew, not only in people, in commerce, in riches, but also how it became a symbol, an expression of the aspiration of Louis XIV and his minister, Colbert, who wished to emulate Augustan Rome. *From the original edition” —J. H. Plumb, Saturday Review

“The seventeenth century comes alive… Ranum has done much to explain the place of Paris in the development of absolutism, the evolution of society during the Ancién Regime, the importance of the corporations, and the gradual alienation between Paris and the crown. * From the original edition” —The Historian

“It was, and still is, an intricate blend of architectural, economic, social, political, and intellectual history, coming together to produce a powerful impression upon the reader.” —Paul Sonnino, History

“When travelers take a walk around twenty-first century Paris, they should take Orest Ranum’s Paris in the Age of Absolutism with them.” —Michael R. Lynn, Sixteenth Century Journal

“But this classic—and now sumptuously produced—book is still a wonderful read, and it is good to have it available again in this mildly updated format.” —Colin Jones, European History Quarterly

Orest Ranum is Professor of History Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is The Fronde: A French Revolution (1993).

Contents

Introduction: Parisian History as Part of French History

Chronology

Part I. The Medieval Burden

1. A Traveler’s View in 1600

2. An Explosive Political Climate

3. The Necessity of a Capital

Part I. Foundations of Modernity

4. Early Bourbon Absolutism

5. The Birth of Modern Paris

6. The Neighborhood Builders

7. The First Women Writers

III. Medieval Revival

8. A Generation of Saints

9. The Last Heroes

10. The Corporate Parisians

IV. Urban Absolutism: The Flight from Modernity

11. The Frondeurs

12. A Generation of Tartuffes

13. The New Rome

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Introduction: Parisian History as Part of French History

You politely, almost fearfully, asked for another piece of bread. Your father simply stared at you coldly. You are perhaps fifteen, maybe sixteen, you are not sure which. The soup had been hot, but thin; the eggs watery and vaguely sulphurous, a sign that they should have been eaten weeks earlier. The gnawing in your belly was almost as strong after supper as before it. Your older brothers had sat in silence, not quite staring the other way, but deliberately avoiding your eyes. Your exhausted mother is heavy with yet another child.

The next morning, you packed your other shirt in a little canvas bag, put on your hat, and set off alone on the road to Paris, some eighty miles away. A three- or four-day walk. Finding a straw stack last night was no problem, for the harvest has just ended. A cousin on your mother’s side of the family, who is a cook and lives with a printer’s family on the rue Saint-Jacques, can be counted on to put you up for a few nights when you reach Paris. Somewhere, somehow, you will find someone who needs wood hauled to the attic, a cellar cleaned out, manure loaded onto a wagon, water carried upstairs, or ashes removed from fireplaces. You walk along the dusty road in the August sun. When the cousin had gone to Paris, they had had to find someone with whom she could travel; for only women of ill repute, or the very poor and the aged, walked the highroad alone. Your name is Jean.

Are you fictional? Are you historical? The answer is: A bit of both. Until you marry, or more accurately, if you marry—or until you commit a major crime and get caught—no one will ask you for your surname: Jean will suffice. You lack the cash to be apprenticed to an artisan, so your only hope is to become a household servant, somewhere in the capital. Work in an inn is a possibility, or work in a stable.

Are you part of history? Yes, but not the high, lofty type of history that centers on battles and politics. Thousands of young people left their homes and villages to, as the phrase went, "seek their fortune" in the capital. Their parents had loved them, but by the time adolescents were fifteen or sixteen, they were considered more than grown-up; and there simply were too many mouths to feed every night. The Parisian population in the seventeenth century was not yet self-sustaining, that is, more infants died than reached childbearing age. Without the steady arrival of teenagers such as Jean, the population of the capital actually would have declined; and since that population is known to have roughly doubled over the seventeenth century, there clearly were thousands of young migrants such as Jean. There is something startlingly contemporary about teenage migration to Paris in the seventeenth century; for today it still occurs, legally, vaguely legally, or downright illegally, around every great urban center of the world.

Normans, Picards, Bretons, young people from the Beauce and from Champagne who know how to take care of babies, make fires, rub down horses—all with regional accents, colloquial turns of phrase, and some sense of pride at hailing from a particular market town or province—came to Paris in search of work. If a foreigner asked them where they came from, "France" was the immediate reply; but if a French person asked the same question, the name of the province of their birth was the answer. These young migrants would seek out relatives, often not all that close, or other young people from their village, and would beg for shelter; and as in all cultures of poverty, the hospitality they received was often accompanied with a warning that it was temporary. It was discouraging to walk the streets, looking for work or for a handout. On each street, in each quarter, the artisans, their apprentices, and the common laborers knew one another: they drank and caroused together. Merchants and their wives conversed as they set up their stands, all the while eyeing passersby or "idlers," to ensure that they did not filch a sausage. It was not easy for a new arrival to worm his way into the street sociability of the capital. Knowing someone, and being introduced, was almost indispensable.

At certain hours, traffic was horrendous. Coachmen shouted, "Make way for the Duchess of Such-and-Such," and in reply arms would fly up, with an obscene gesture. Clergymen, judges, attorneys, and physicians—in the gowns and caps appropriate to their profession and rank—majestically skirted the slop-filled potholes in the street, their trains or capes held up by livery boys dressed in the colors of their master. Wearing livery was a source of pride, not servitude: it indicated that the wearer belonged to a household, that he ate regularly, that he had a roof over his head.

Street scenes certainly changed over the course of the seventeenth century. As the decades passed, there were more richly gilded and carved coaches than ever before. Sedan chairs proliferated, as did great two-wheeled carts loaded with huge barrels of wine. The number of beggars, hawkers, flower-girls, prostitutes, magicians, jugglers, and pickpockets soared, despite police efforts to arrest them, make them pay for licenses, or chase them into the suburbs. Young people coming to Paris for the first time could not, of course, measure the changes brought by increased population and greater luxury consumption; but change there was.

In times of epidemic, food shortage or extreme cold, the city fathers and the churches and monasteries of the capital would make little-used cellars, stables, and partially abandoned chapels available to the poor. There would be serious epidemics, that is, plague, in the first quarter of the century, and in the 1680s cold weather ruined wheat crops and drove up the prices for flour and bread. When bread prices climbed, the city fathers would legislate to keep them down, and they would post militia guards at flour and bread markets, to reduce the danger that the hungry poor would riot. Monasteries and prominent, well-off, and devout Parisians would open soup kitchens. The typical Parisian cared little about the power relations between the city fathers and the king’s ministers, but they closely followed decisions about bread prices, excise taxes on wine, and regulations concerning the places where one could work and the hours during which work could be done. Over the century, a more hands-on regulatory administration would be created, along with special police and judicial powers and officials. Heaps of legislation, decrees, and orders had been pasted on walls or announced by town-criers, but enforcement remained ineffectual until well into the 1660s.

The laws regarding work rules, marketing, quality-control in manufacturing, acceptable or unacceptable street behavior, and even drinking, gambling, and loudness in cabarets, were much more coherently promulgated and enforced in the reign of Louis XIV than they had been over the previous centuries. Parisians had little choice but to conform to these state-enforced rules, most of which came down from high, that is, from the king in council through the office of lieutenant of police, created in 1667.

The word police in seventeenth-century France was a very general moral and legal concept that extended far beyond simply repressing criminality and assuring that laws were enforced. Police meant not just the good society, but the way to live the good life together, in community, according to divine and natural laws. On the one hand, police meant the government’s duty to lift up the wayward, protect any and all persons and provide them with charity, and repress all threatening, violent and heretical behavior and thought. The laws establishing police were not only moral but religious and political. They all came down from the king for the good of each and everyone; and individuals had little if any right to challenge, in court, the royal definition of the best life-style and the best community.

For almost two centuries, historians have used the term "absolutism" to characterize this new regime of laws and police power, be it for Paris in particular or for the entire realm. The word, in its political and legal significance, simply means total, complete, without appeal, unquestionable. Royal power was not only deemed to be legitimate and divinely ordained; it was absolute. There were no legal or spiritual grounds for disobeying it.

Confronted by the lieutenant of police’s coercive powers to legislate and enforce a virtually religious utopia in the form of a safer, cleaner, morally conformist, and more regimented and more prosperous Paris, the old city officials saw their power decline and their functions become largely ceremonial. Political emasculation in the name of absolute legal and royal authority? Yes, in a sense. While the old, late-medieval oligarchical city government run by merchants, lawyers, and guild officers had not been democratic, there had been at least a modicum of citizen participation in the Paris Hôtel de Ville.

Could some medieval centuries actually have been more "democratic" than the Parisian governance prevailing in the seventeenth century? This idea challenges our one-directional sense of progress involving civic rights for individuals and government by laws established by and for the people. Such was the case, however, in the history of Paris, in no small measure because the sixteenth-century movement not only to attain but also to increase individual civic rights became linked to a zealous Catholic religious reform movement that had as its principal aim the conversion, the exclusion, and finally the execution or murder of Protestants. The blending of the religious with the political community of civic rights occurred to a degree of intensity that made it "thinkable" to contemplate the murder of entire families in one’s neighborhood, prompting a paroxysm of violence in the capital known as the Wars of Religion.

p a r t o n e

The Medieval Burden

A Traveler’s View in 1600

Imagine a circle of gray stone walls a mile and a half in diameter lying on a green,

rolling plain. This circle of walls, cut by the meandering Seine and surrounded by the

distant "mountains" of Passy, Montmartre, Montparnasse, and Valérien, embraced an

in Paris), 474 parishes (59 in Paris), 256 chapels (90 in Paris), and 34 hospitals, of

which 5 were in Paris and the faubourgs.

During festivals, when people’s thoughts turned to the problem of whether their

souls were destined for heaven or for hell, nuns from a nearby foundling hospital

brought orphan babies into Notre-Dame and placed them in a straw-lined box for all

to watch. The offerings for the hospital thus increased in proportion to the obsession

with sin and the compassion for these babies that gripped the faithful. Guidebooks in

the seventeenth century never mention the beautiful stained-glass windows that made

Notre-Dame very dark inside. In the eighteenth century, for the sake of light and

splendor, the lower ones were knocked out and replaced by blue glass, so that the long

rows of columns, now free of tombs and central chapels, could be admired by all. But

in 1600 the gloom was interrupted only by the points of candle and lamplight before

statues of Our Lady and the saints, each one invoked for a special problem or malady.

Notre-Dame was still something of a religious marketplace in which sinners wandered,

searched, and shopped for solace.

Notre-Dame was a busy place. Students filed in noisily to write examinations in

the nave while the great organ played to inspire them. And to the regular rhythm of

matins, vespers, and masses for church holidays was added the bustle of city functions,

ceremonies of the courts of justice, guild celebrations, weddings, and funerals.

Between this religious capital of France and the judicial capital at the western end

of the island stood a quarter full of old houses, with religious establishments and

parish churches. There were more than twenty churches on the island. Along the rues

de la Lanterne, de la Juiverie, and du Marché Palu, all torn down in the nineteenth

century, stood many medieval houses, by then subdivided into several dwellings, in

which lived bourgeois and notaries. There, too, was the "Pine Cone," a famous cabaret

and favorite haunt of Racine, Boileau, Molière, and Lully.

Beyond rose the Palais, a sprawling maze of chiefly Gothic buildings and courtyards,

which had once served as a residence for French kings. It still was a residence,

in theory, but since the fourteenth century the sovereign courts had expanded to use

all the space. Housed there were the Parlement, Chambre des Comptes, Cour des

Aides, and Cour des Monnaies, together constituting the highest courts in the kingdom.

The Sainte-Chapelle, built in the thirteenth century as a vast reliquary for a

thorn from the crown of thorns, stood in the center of the great courtyard, its flèche

rising higher than all the buildings around it. In 1600 the interior was still little

changed from what it had been in Saint Louis’ time, except that many relics and altarpieces

had been added to this royal chapel, endowing its wealthy, aristocratic clergy

with a rich treasure. The lower chapel served as a parish church for those living in the

Palais and nearby streets.

To the Palais scurried a population as diverse in interests and status as Paris itself.

There were probably four or five thousand magistrates, clerks, copyists, and minor

officials such as huissiers (doorkeepers) who together made up the personnel of the sovereign courts. In addition to these, merchants, booksellers, paper and ink sellers,

prostitutes, singers, letter writers, and beggars, among others, daily set up shop or frequented

the dozens of stalls displaying such items as cloth, mirrors, dolls, knives, lace,

and purses. In this maze of corridors and chambers the principal attraction remained

the grande salle itself, with its marble floor, heavy columns lined with statues of French

kings, and gold ceiling. It was considered smart to go to the grande salle, for it was a

favorite meeting place for distinguished people or for those who wanted to see them

and buy luxury goods.

From the gates of the Palais the street led north past the Tour de l’Horloge, across the

Pont-au-Change to the Châtelet and the ville; or south across the Pont Saint-Michel to

the University. The Right Bank, called the ville in medieval times because it was the

commercial part of Paris, had lost this special significance as early as the fourteenth century,

when merchants settled on the Left Bank, or University, around the Place Maubert.

Before reaching the Right Bank, one passed under a fortress gate. The Châtelet was

originally built as a castle to guard the bridge to the Cité, but very early it came to

house the courts and prisons of the prévôté of Paris. Jurisdiction was both civil and

criminal, equivalent to that of a bailliage in the provinces, nominally under the control

of the prévôt of Paris (not to be confused with the prévôt des marchands), who rendered justice in the king’s name in the city and who, in processions, marched right after the

president of the Parlement and before the nobility. By 1600 the Châtelet had come

under the Parlement’s control, through the lieutenant civil, who directed its functions.

Despite repairs under Francis I, from the fifteenth century on the Châtelet was partly

in ruins, as shown in a Silvestre engraving of about 1650.

Beyond the Châtelet stood the central commercial and marketing section of Paris.

After Philip Augustus established the Halles there as a kind of perpetual fair, the

Right Bank became the stronghold of commercial society in Paris. Street names were

usually functional: the rue de la Savonnerie (soap), rue de la Chausseterie (stockings),

rue de la Cossonnerie (fowl), and rue de la Lingerie (linens). There merchants, as

many as two dozen strong, would gather along a street to sell the same products. The

rue de la Fripponerie contained many clothing shops where one could bargain, trade

in the clothes on one’s back for some others, either used or new, and pay the difference.

Up the rue Saint-Denis from the Châtelet, and west along the rue de la Ferronnerie,

stood the Church and Cemetery of the Innocents. The chapels, galleries of charnel

houses, lamps, crosses, frescoes of the Dance of Death, and the open common graves

aroused the morbid curiosity of visitors in 1600. Some parts of the cemetery were

reserved for the dead of special corporations, such as the hospitals of Sainte-Catherine

and the Hôtel-Dieu, the chapter of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and the Châtelet, but

most of it contained common graves for Parisians from every part of the city. The

earth of the Innocents was said to be remarkable, because it could manger son cadavre

en neuf jours (consume its cadaver in nine days). When graves had to be dug again in

the same spot, the bones were pulled out of the earth and stored in piles along the

walls. Two or three common graves stood open at the same time.

Adjacent to the cemetery on the northwest were the Halles, a series of pavilions

where merchants rented stalls to sell chiefly grain, leather, cloth, and meat, and where

articles were sold retail and wholesale to merchants (foreign and domestic) and consumers

alike. The apparent confusion on market days belied the stringent laws and

customs regulating sales, the use of land in the nearby streets, and the organization of

produce by its place of origin. The Normans tended to put their stands together in

one part of the market, to stay in the same inns, and to travel together, as did merchants

from other provinces and foreign countries. Commerce was still familial and

provincial. The houses in the market parishes of Sainte-Opportune, Saint-Jacques-dela-

Boucherie, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Denis were both commercial and residential,

with their ground floors invariably a shop, either for sales or manufacture, and the

upper floors living quarters for merchant or artisan families, servants, and apprentices.

In the midst of these stands, pavilions, inns, and houses stood several monasteries,

each with its own cloister, refectory, school, and gardens. They varied in size and function,

but like the parish churches they were filled with chapels, windows, tapestries,

and altars given them by various guilds over the centuries. These chapels served as

meeting houses for guilds and for weddings and funerals of the members. Paid masses

on behalf of the living and deceased members of their company were said in the guilds’

own sanctuaries, often decorated with trowels, scissors, or some other instrument serving

as their emblem.

This commercial section was bounded on the west by an aristocratic quarter, beginning

with Saint-Eustache and the Hôtels de Soissons and Longueville. It extended on

the east as far as the Hôtel de Ville and the Place de la Grève before it. The Hôtel de

Ville was an unfinished palace in the French Renaissance style in 1600, but it served as

the meeting place for the bureau de ville—the elected officials of the bourgeois of Paris—

and for receiving members of the royal family and visiting dignitaries, such as ambassadors.

The registers of the elections and business and legal proceedings of the prévôt des

marchands and échevins were kept there, as were arms for the militia, the seals of Paris, and

its official weights and measures. The Place de la Grève was then much lower than the

present square and was frequently flooded by the Seine. In the minds of Parisians, La

Grève evoked the numerous public executions that took place there—decapitation for

the nobility, hanging for commoners, and burning for heretics and sorcerers. People

living on the square rented out their windows on days of public executions.

Except for the area bordering the quays, Paris beyond the Hôtel de Ville and the

Church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève was mainly aristocratic. The Marais, or parishes of

Saint-Gervais and Saint-Paul, was the most fashionable and wealthy part of the city.

Since the late Middle Ages, when the royal residences of Saint-Pol and the Tournelles

had attracted numerous aristocrats and clergymen to build in the area, the Marais had

been the most homogeneous and solidly aristocratic part of the city. After the demolition

of the old palace of Saint-Pol under Francis I and the sale of its land to a president

of the Parlement, who built the Hôtel de Carnavalet, numerous judges and new

aristocrats also bought and built in the area between the Hôtel de Ville and the Bastille.

But the princes still set the tone. Diane de France, and later Charles de Valois, built and

lived in what is now the Hôtel Lamoignon; the Guises had built a little to the northwest

of them; and later, Sully settled in the rue Saint-Antoine not far from the Duke

of Maine. The medieval Hôtel de Sens had served as a kind of headquarters for the

Leaguish plots. Most of the favorites of the last Valois king—d’O, Gondy, Vitry—had

installed themselves there, as had the Jesuits who built Saint-Louis. Gardens stretched

back to meet each other; the new streets were wide enough to let carriages pass.

Though the least medieval section of Paris in 1600, several monasteries, the Hôtel de

Sens, the Bastille, and the Temple still assured the inhabitants that they were in the old

city. The Temple was a walled-in, turreted, and crenellated fortress that served as a residence for aristocrats, artisans, and debtors seeking to avoid the police of Paris. Artisans

could work there free from the restrictions of a guild because the grand prieur

defended the independence of the Temple against both the city and the monarchy.

The city was still very sparse west of the Halles. From the north the walls built

by Charles V came down abruptly to the gates of Montmartre and Saint-Honoré, to

disappear under the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. Outside were fields and windmills,

just four or five narrow streets away from Saint-Eustache. This church, begun in

1532, rose high and spacious, reflecting the wealth and status of the merchants west

of the Halles, and of the courtiers who lived in the houses and inns near the Louvre.

Richelieu was baptized there in 1586, while his father was attending Henry III at

Court.

Long fashionable because of its proximity to the Louvre, the area became a European

center of art and culture in the late sixteenth century. Catherine de Médicis built a large

hôtel there, later called the Hôtel de Soissons (all that remains of it is the astrologer’s column

between the Bourse de Commerce and the Halles), and by this means attracted

numerous favorites to an otherwise mercantile and monotonous district of the city.

The rue Saint-Honoré, leading west from the Cemetery of the Innocents to the city

gates of Saint-Honoré, was lined with late medieval houses and inns, where courtiers

who had to follow the Court stayed when the king was in the Louvre. The Porte Saint-

Honoré, with its turrets, drawbridge, and guardians, still stood about where we today

find the little square between the antique shops of the Louvre and the Comédie

Française. The Hospice of the Quinze-Vingts, founded for the blind by Louis IX,

occupied a big piece of land along the street, reaching back to where the rue de Rivoli

now is. In addition to the blind, numerous artisans lived there in order to be under

the protection of the Hospice and thus escape the restrictions of the guilds. Judging

from the inscriptions on the tombs of the Quinze-Vingts, the neighborhood around

it must have housed some of the first families to move from commerce into the service

of the Crown. Referred to simultaneously as noble homme, merchant, and notary to

the king, those interred so near the Louvre must have been some of the first robe families

of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Several streets ran behind the hospital, between the Louvre and the walls, approximately

where Napoleon was to build the Arc du Carrousel.

After demolition of the donjon and the south entrance of the Louvre under Francis I,

one gained access to the Louvre from the east side, in the rue d’Autriche, which

descended from just east of where the Oratoire now stands, down between the palace

of the Petit Bourbon and the Louvre, to reach the quay of the Seine. This postern

entrance had been built by Charles V as a part of the flamboyant, even fanciful Gothic

residence into which he had transformed the old fortress of Philip Augustus. After

crossing the drawbridge over the moat and passing under the east wing, one entered a

courtyard crowded with people, carriages, and horses. The people had either come out

of curiosity or to beg, steal, or otherwise seek their fortune in the Louvre, for the courtyard

was open to anyone wishing to enter.

The Gothic walls of the "old" Louvre on the north and east sides of the courtyard

must have been in sharp contrast to those facing the Seine and the west. These latter

had been built in the last half of the sixteenth century in the Renaissance style. Instead

of conical roofs and gargoyles, there was a balanced play of classical columns, windows,

and statues carved after the manner of the ancients. These two wings were much as we

see them today, though without the more recent central pavilions—the western one

built under Louis XIII by Le Mercier and the southern one under Louis XIV by Le Vau.

Tourists from all over Europe marveled at the beauty of these wings, forming an L,

designed partly by Lescot and decorated, in the salle des cariatides, by Goujon. Judging

from the number of travel accounts that include descriptions of the rooms, it must have

been relatively easy to visit the interior and even the royal apartments. In both the old

and new parts, the rooms on the ground floor were very long and wide, with huge

painted beams and supporting cross beams painted with arabesques and monograms of

the last Valois kings. On the floor above, the ceilings were even more magnificent,

done in the Italian style of plaster and panels, covered with gold leaf and frescoes representingscenes from classical mythology. Only one of these ceilings has survived in its

original place, tastefully restored and made beautiful again by the birds of Braque.

Some of the older galleries, with their massive fireplaces and dark, smoked-up ceilings,

looked much like the interiors we can see today in the much-restored Hôtel de Cluny,

built a hundred years later. Tapestries covered the walls from floor to ceiling. The monumentalfireplaces and the small windows and doors, cut through here and there at random,were reminiscent of a fortress and gave these rooms a somber dignity outmoded

by the bright, sensual, regular style of the Renaissance wings.

On the south side of the Seine, opposite the Louvre and up a hundred yards from

the bank, stood the richest abbey in the Île de France. Founded by Childebert in about

543, Saint-Germain-des-Prés grew under the double aegis of the Benedictine order

and royal favor. The abbots were high-ranking feudal lords, usually of royal blood.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain, extending from the lands of the Luxembourg Palace

west to the Seine, where the Eiffel Tower now stands, was completely under the jurisdiction

of the abbey court. The monastery contained one of the largest prisons in Paris

and was the scene of many public hangings.

Standing almost alone beyond the walls in 1600, Saint-Germain still possessed all

the characteristics of a medieval stronghold. Surrounded by a wide ditch, high

crenellated walls, towers, drawbridges, and gates, the abbey remained as independent

of Paris physically as it was legally.

The abbey church housed numerous relics and a vast treasury of altar vessels and

manuscripts. Its three towers (only one survives) dominated the entire Left Bank below

the "mountain" of Sainte-Geneviève. Within the walls were chapels, a large and a small

cloister, a bakery, a refectory, storehouses, numerous gardens, stables, and a new palace

for the abbot constructed in about 1690 (now 3, rue de l’Abbaye). Saint-Germain-des-

Prés was vast, encompassing many city blocks. It collected revenues from the produce

grown by farmers on its lands and from the owners of hôtels, who paid an annual cens

even after they had bought the land from the abbey. Its erudition, aristocratic tone, and

venerability still made Saint-Germain-des-Prés a formidable ally or a dangerous adversary

for the monarchy.

In 1482, Louis XI restored the abbey’s rights—lost in 1176—to hold a fair near

the monastery. Beginning a fortnight after Easter and lasting for three weeks, but often

prolonged, the fair was one of the outstanding commercial and social events of the capital

throughout the Ancien Régime. The main pavilion was nearly two hundred feet wide.

Its stone walls and massive, high roof sheltered the principal stall-lined alleys, named